VirtualBox VM: SIOCSIFADDR No such device / fix the networking device

When developing within a virtual machine with a bridged networking adapter, rather than (NAT) Networking Address Translation, the network setup can be conveniently uncoupled from the outside networking environment.
Unfortunately my Debian 6 VM setup used a direct networking bridge, installed by the VirtualBox setup.
As such using different ISP's results in different address spaces, in addition to A class networks within private networks.

Now and then my networking device vanished altogether. Particularly when crashes occurred, with only eth0, the loopback device being present after a fresh bootup.

$ /etc/init.d/networking restart

A network restart was quitted with the following error: 

Configuring network interfaces...SIOCSIFADDR: No such device

eth1: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

SIOCSIFNETMASK: No such device

SIOCSIFBRDADDR: No such device

eth1: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

eth1: ERROR while getting interface flags: No such device

Failed to bring up eth1.

In passing, it is worthwhile to mention the commands ifup adaptername and ifdown adaptername to selectively start or shutdown network adapters.
When googling the aforementioned issue, it becomes apparent that the problem may be MAC address related. 

The suggested fix is to clear out the /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules file.

$ mv /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules.bak
$ touch /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules
$ reboot

Source1, Source2

Unfortunately this had no effect.

Fix

What did work however is to simply clone the Virtual Machine, and tick "reinitialize the MAC address of all network cards".

Later on, it appeared that changing the hostname and restarting the network may work as well.

$ echo "newhostname" > /etc/hostname

Perhaps even the Samba demon configuration may be at fault, with a fix as simple as restarting the DHCP assignment.

$ dhclient

You may also try to change the MAC address from within the VirtualBox GUI (see the green-recycle button), as well as try reassigning the Network adapter from within the VirtualBox graphical user interface. That is by switching off Adapter 1, and copying the values over to Adapter 2 as follows:

Let others know what worked for you.